Fedora 18 beta (almost) brings MATE alternative to GNOME desktop

MATE desktop promised by Fedora Project held up by bugs but is nearly ready.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project today released the beta version of Fedora version 18, nicknamed "Spherical Cow." The Linux desktop operating system continues its use of the GNOME desktop as the default user interface, but for the first time it adds the MATE desktop as an officially supported alternative.

Or at least, it almost does. A Red Hat press release today says, "The MATE desktop is available for the first time in Fedora," and points to a download link for the Fedora 18 beta. But upon my installing Fedora 18 in a VMware virtual machine there was no option in the login screen to switch from GNOME to MATE.

There are separate installers for versions of Fedora with the KDE, XFCE, and LXDE desktops, but none for MATE. So I took the Fedora Project's advice and ran the "yum install @mate-desktop" command in the Fedora 18 terminal only to find that I am missing something called the "libmate-panel-applet-2.so.1()(64bit)."

The yum install command did work on Fedora 17 for me, installing without a hitch and adding an option for MATE in the login screen. If you get it working today, MATE on Fedora 17 looks like this:

MATE relief coming soon

I contacted Fedora Project developer Dan Mashal, who is leading the MATE integration, and he said a fix is in the works. "We had MATE 1.4 working fine. But 1.5 came out and we decided to push that. There are some broken dependencies that I'm currently sorting out," he said via IM.

Mashal said it could be fixed as soon as tonight or tomorrow. (UPDATE: Mashal says the fix has now been deployed.) This fix, however, will only work with the Fedora 18 netinstall media, Mashal said, which can be installed from this link (download). The netinstall version (once fixed) will include MATE as an option right out of the box and is the recommended way to use MATE with Fedora 18, Mashal said. If there are cases in which a terminal command is needed, the proper command in Fedora 18 is simply "yum install @mate," he said.

But using the command with the download the Red Hat/Fedora Project pointed users to today leads to the same error I mentioned before. In fact, MATE won't work at all with the Fedora 18 DVD install media, as you can see from this bug report, which says installation results in an "incomplete mate-desktop." The Fedora press release announcing the Fedora 18 beta is thus pointing users who want MATE to the wrong download location. Mashal said the fix he is working on won't help matters at all with the DVD install media.

Eventually, I was able to install and use MATE on the netinstall version of Fedora 18 using the "yum install @mate" command. But as Mashal mentioned, there are problems with the netinstall version still being fixed, so your mileage may vary.

In the future, installing MATE may be much less confusing. Fedora Project developer Rex Dieter told me that "Future Fedora releases may include a dedicated MATE spin, similar as is done for other spins like XFCE or KDE," which are at http://spins.fedoraproject.org.

That would certainly be a welcome development. The Fedora Project says its goal in including MATE as an officially supported alternative to GNOME is to "attract new users to Fedora," so ease of use should be a priority. It should work better than it does in Fedora 17 and it should be easier to install and set up.

Including MATE isa worthy goal. While Ubuntu switched from the classic GNOME shell to its own Unity interface, Fedora has stuck with GNOME, which underwent a major graphical overhaul between versions 2 and 3. Unity and GNOME's latest interface have not been universally beloved, helping fuel interest in MATE, a fork of the GNOME 2 codebase and one of the default desktop environments for the increasingly popular Linux Mint.

MATE gives users who came from the GNOME 2 world a much more familiar interface, and its developers have worked hard to make it among the most user-friendly desktop environments on Linux. MATE's success may be part of the reason GNOME developers are now planning a "classic" interface that lets users go back to something closer to the GNOME 2 way of doing things. (We've chronicled the development of GNOME 3 with a review of its initial release last year and an examination of GNOME 3.4 in April of this year.)

Mashal is among those who prefer GNOME 2 over GNOME 3. In addition to leading the charge to get MATE into Fedora, he is attempting to get elected to the Fedora board.

Fedora 18 is more than just MATE, mate

Beyond MATE, the Fedora Project said version 18 also has updates to the KDE, XFCE, and Sugar desktops. GNOME has been updated to version 3.6.

Fedora 18 also has improvements aimed at developers and system administrators. For developers, Fedora updates programming languages to Perl 5.16 and Python 3.3, and the Rails framework to 3.2, while also updating the D and Haskell programming environments.

Goodies for system admins include Samba 4, featuring better integration with Active Directory; the latest release of OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service software; Eucalyptus 3.1; and Storage System Management command line interface tools.

Unlike Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora is very much community-driven and much of its code ends up in later versions of RHEL. Fedora 17 came out six months ago with new versions of GNOME and GIMP. The official schedule for Fedora 18 says a final release is due Jan. 8, 2013, but it might come earlier. Today's announcement said the final release will be available before the end of this year.

When it does come out we hope fans of the MATE desktop will be equal citizens with their GNOME-using counterparts.

Promoted Comments

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

MATE is like Gnome2, which was well liked (except by those who used Windows, Mac OS, KDE, XFCE, etc, etc).

Anyway, Gnome2 is a pretty straightforward interface, stable and was customizable.Gnome3... is completely different, it's still a bit buggy, and while it's customizable, you need to learn some JavaScript to do it.There's also the slashdot crowd knee jerk reaction that think Gnome3 developers screwed power users to chase tablet interface or users who like pretty things and made Gnome3 unsuitable for "real work". Again, nothing that Gnome2 didn't went through when it came out ("it sucks, gnome 1.8 is so much better).

That said, as someone who still works with Gnome2 every day... you pry Gnome3 out of my cold dead hands, it's the best interface I've ever worked with.

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

One other reason for using MATE over Gnome 3 is the shear amount of hardware support in MATE. I run a triple head system across a GTX 560Ti and a GT 520 using Xinerama. That configuration simply causes Gnome 3 to crash upon start, sadly (and mirror itself in odd ways). I spent a while trying to figure it out, but it just seems this configuration is unsupported. MATE, on the other hand, works without any configuration. Ironically, I actually like the direction Gnome 3 took with the interface, but I can't use it without removing a monitor (which is really not worth it).

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

MATE is like Gnome2, which was well liked (except by those who used Windows, Mac OS, KDE, XFCE, etc, etc).

Anyway, Gnome2 is a pretty straightforward interface, stable and was customizable.Gnome3... is completely different, it's still a bit buggy, and while it's customizable, you need to learn some JavaScript to do it.There's also the slashdot crowd knee jerk reaction that think Gnome3 developers screwed power users to chase tablet interface or users who like pretty things and made Gnome3 unsuitable for "real work". Again, nothing that Gnome2 didn't went through when it came out ("it sucks, gnome 1.8 is so much better).

That said, as someone who still works with Gnome2 every day... you pry Gnome3 out of my cold dead hands, it's the best interface I've ever worked with.

That looks even more hideous than the Windows-Vista-like styling of KDE.

Yes, yes, interfaces are not all about aesthetics, and if it works for someone, awesome, but still; I find that Xubuntu's Greybird theme is the most well thought-out and least gaudy and overdone Linux theme yet.

I look forward to seeing what the Elementary project gives us, because those guys seem to understand quite a lot more about UI design than these guys do (I understand that MATE is not made by Fedora).

please, give it a rest. All software has bugs. RPM is no different than deb or any other package manager. Even Windows suffers from dependency problems from time to time.

My experience has been that Debian-based systems have far more robust package and dependency management than Red Hat. It's the #1 reason I left Fedora years ago for Linux needs.

For servers, yes. Debian all the way, especially since there getting nothing but bugfixes for years actually is a feature. Everywhere else though... getting no new features for years can be quite boring.

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

MATE is like Gnome2, which was well liked (except by those who used Windows, Mac OS, KDE, XFCE, etc, etc).

Anyway, Gnome2 is a pretty straightforward interface, stable and was customizable.Gnome3... is completely different, it's still a bit buggy, and while it's customizable, you need to learn some JavaScript to do it.There's also the slashdot crowd knee jerk reaction that think Gnome3 developers screwed power users to chase tablet interface or users who like pretty things and made Gnome3 unsuitable for "real work". Again, nothing that Gnome2 didn't went through when it came out ("it sucks, gnome 1.8 is so much better).

That said, as someone who still works with Gnome2 every day... you pry Gnome3 out of my cold dead hands, it's the best interface I've ever worked with.

The Gnome developers failed to "play nice" with legacy users. Hhose of us that are already Linux users were basically told FU and STFU. They chose to create a new version of Gnome that is incapable of peacefully coexisting with the old one.

That is all MATE is: a fork of Gnome3 that can be installed in tandem with Gnome3.

It's effort that really shouldn't have been necessary.

"You need to learn JavaScript" to tweak your desktop. That's a pretty good reason to want to use something else.

please, give it a rest. All software has bugs. RPM is no different than deb or any other package manager. Even Windows suffers from dependency problems from time to time.

My experience has been that Debian-based systems have far more robust package and dependency management than Red Hat. It's the #1 reason I left Fedora years ago for Linux needs.

All Debian distros use a 2.0 kernel and have network driver issues, at least thats what it was like years ago when I stopped using Debian but it must still be true now because no-one would have bothered to fix anything with a distro while I wasn't looking right?

This is a BETA version, yes it has the odd bug, thats why its beta, but your ancient experience of Fedora isn't really relevant to anything these days.

And I would imagine that one of the reasons dependency issues crop up in the redhats is because "sudo yum install foo" fails much more often than "sudo apt-get install foo". Which has less to do with yum and apt, and more to do with the quality and scope of the repositories. When you have to install via other means, that is when dependencies start biting you, and that's true for both the redhats and the debians.

Any chance Ars can do a Linux Desktop round up? A family tree, a brief history of each, the philosophy behind them and why that has led to the design decisions they've made? It'll probably cause a firestorm, but what sort of use cases / users are individual desktops particularly good for?

I'm a technically literate individual, but I'm an inveterate windows user. The picture this article paints of an ever fragmenting landscape does nothing to appeal to me. Equally, whilst I accept that ultimately it's about usability, that Mate screenshot does nothing to attract me outside of the virtual desktops - the comments says it was started in 1997 and it looks like it - to my eyes it's really ugly.

Whilst I say ever fragmenting, I accept that that equally provides choice; without some form of guide however what is there to pull me - as a non Linux user - in?

And I would imagine that one of the reasons dependency issues crop up in the redhats is because "sudo yum install foo" fails much more often than "sudo apt-get install foo". Which has less to do with yum and apt, and more to do with the quality and scope of the repositories. When you have to install via other means, that is when dependencies start biting you, and that's true for both the redhats and the debians.

And I would imagine that one of the reasons dependency issues crop up in the redhats is because "sudo yum install foo" fails much more often than "sudo apt-get install foo". Which has less to do with yum and apt, and more to do with the quality and scope of the repositories. When you have to install via other means, that is when dependencies start biting you, and that's true for both the redhats and the debians.

Is that not reason enough to switch?

Perhaps, but it is also the exact opposite of my experience with the distros.

please, give it a rest. All software has bugs. RPM is no different than deb or any other package manager. Even Windows suffers from dependency problems from time to time.

My experience has been that Debian-based systems have far more robust package and dependency management than Red Hat. It's the #1 reason I left Fedora years ago for Linux needs.

For servers, yes. Debian all the way, especially since there getting nothing but bugfixes for years actually is a feature. Everywhere else though... getting no new features for years can be quite boring.

You just change your repos to testing or unstable and you're up to date. I even run kernels from experimental because I like to play with btrfs.

For those of you talking about yum and apt-get, as far as I know, apt-get is only used to work with debian repos now. No Fedora or RHEL repo I know of actually works with apt-get any more.

As for Gnome 3, it wasn't the new design that pissed me off. It was the attitude of the Gnome devs. I understand that they want to instil branding and user experience and such, but this is my desktop, not their's. Sure, build what ever you want as the out of box experience, but don't go out of your way to actively stop me from making changes.

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

One other reason for using MATE over Gnome 3 is the shear amount of hardware support in MATE. I run a triple head system across a GTX 560Ti and a GT 520 using Xinerama. That configuration simply causes Gnome 3 to crash upon start, sadly (and mirror itself in odd ways). I spent a while trying to figure it out, but it just seems this configuration is unsupported. MATE, on the other hand, works without any configuration. Ironically, I actually like the direction Gnome 3 took with the interface, but I can't use it without removing a monitor (which is really not worth it).

Any chance Ars can do a Linux Desktop round up? A family tree, a brief history of each, the philosophy behind them and why that has led to the design decisions they've made? It'll probably cause a firestorm, but what sort of use cases / users are individual desktops particularly good for?

There are two major desktop environments in Linux.

The first is KDE and it started in 1996 because... well, there wasn't any good open source desktop environment. Back then, we were using very simple graphical environments (Afterstep user here).

Next came Gnome, in 1997. Gnome came to be mostly because KDE was based on the Qt graphic libraries which, at the time, presented some licensing issues.

They both strive to be general purpose, sophisticated desktop environments. The absence of licensing issues did play a part in Gnome becoming the dominant Linux desktop and the one with more backing from the enterprise developers.

As result, Gnome was steered into delivering a simple and good experience out of the box for those who don't know or don't care to know, while KDE ended up focusing on sophistication, looks, experience, usability.

A third contender is Xfce, which started at the same time as KDE with the goal of creating a free clone of CDE and evolved into being a light weight alternative to Gnome and KDE.

And recently, we have the Gnome 3 issue. The Gnome project decided that, for version 3, they would radically change the user interface which lead to much discontent and, where's discontent in open source, are forks.The MATE project forked Gnome 2.8 in order to keep developing it, keeping the same user interface.On the other hand, Ubuntu developed Unity and later Linux Mint developed Cinnamon.Both Unity and Cinnamon rely heavily on the Gnome3 infraestructure (libraries, systems) but have their own, different user interface.

How to deal with this? Well, if you install Ubuntu you can have Unity, Gnome 3, KDE and Xfce installed at the same time so you can try them out as you wish.Eventually, someone will make MATE and Cinnamon available as well for Ubuntu -- if they haven't already.

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

MATE is like Gnome2, which was well liked (except by those who used Windows, Mac OS, KDE, XFCE, etc, etc).

Anyway, Gnome2 is a pretty straightforward interface, stable and was customizable.Gnome3... is completely different, it's still a bit buggy, and while it's customizable, you need to learn some JavaScript to do it.There's also the slashdot crowd knee jerk reaction that think Gnome3 developers screwed power users to chase tablet interface or users who like pretty things and made Gnome3 unsuitable for "real work". Again, nothing that Gnome2 didn't went through when it came out ("it sucks, gnome 1.8 is so much better).

That said, as someone who still works with Gnome2 every day... you pry Gnome3 out of my cold dead hands, it's the best interface I've ever worked with.

The Gnome developers failed to "play nice" with legacy users. Hhose of us that are already Linux users were basically told FU and STFU. They chose to create a new version of Gnome that is incapable of peacefully coexisting with the old one.

That is all MATE is: a fork of Gnome3 that can be installed in tandem with Gnome3.

It's effort that really shouldn't have been necessary.

"You need to learn JavaScript" to tweak your desktop. That's a pretty good reason to want to use something else.

Any chance Ars can do a Linux Desktop round up? A family tree, a brief history of each, the philosophy behind them and why that has led to the design decisions they've made? It'll probably cause a firestorm, but what sort of use cases / users are individual desktops particularly good for?

I'm a technically literate individual, but I'm an inveterate windows user. The picture this article paints of an ever fragmenting landscape does nothing to appeal to me. Equally, whilst I accept that ultimately it's about usability, that Mate screenshot does nothing to attract me outside of the virtual desktops - the comments says it was started in 1997 and it looks like it - to my eyes it's really ugly.

Whilst I say ever fragmenting, I accept that that equally provides choice; without some form of guide however what is there to pull me - as a non Linux user - in?

This isn't meant as a criticism, really, sell it to me as a customer.

At the very top level:Fedora/RHEL is the enterprise server standard, Red hat makes a billion or whatever on Linux server services, and they are the standard for developing server applications - nearly any enterprise application certified for unix/linux will run on RHEL.

Ubuntu is the consumer pc standard. It's the most popular distro with the most support and most user (afaict), even if their interface has come into controversy currently (like Windows 8 but for different reasons). As a long time linux user at my job and a long time linux tinkerer at home, this is the distro to play with first.

It's pointless imo to pursue other distros if you can't install and run RHEL/Ubuntu on your hardware first.

Oh, if you only want to learn the command line and basic architecture or you lack a test machine/hdd space, cygwin is a unix sort-of environment that runs Windows.

If you're asking, why should I bother? Maybe you shouldn't, that depends on your capabilities and needs. Linux is good for text-heavy or data projects (for tech savvy researchers), it's good as a media server with xbmc, it's great for security, good for development, esp web. It's not good for gaming or simple file/media management, and it's weak with artsy type applications imo. As a server, it's great for web, 'big data', minimal setups or cheap hardware or custom applications or simple maintenance free setups. It's the most flexible open OS around, and that's both a blessing (you can do anything with it) and a curse (everyone does everything in their spare time and so like my house nothing is ever quite finished).

If OSX was formed by a dictator, Windows formed by a capitalist cabal, Unix formed by academia, Linux distros are the children of a mob. The core of the movement is focused around one charismatic leader (Linus Torvalds) with no command structure, so everyone on the periphery is just wandering around. Android (built on linux) has resulted in a more coherent, usable OS in a fraction of the time that desktop linux has been around. On the other hand, Android could disappear overnight, Linux will probably be around forever.

RedHat also sells enterprise desktop support. My guess is some of their corporate clients would prefer to stay with the familiar Gnome 2 interface & APIs, which is why they're investing effort into MATE.

Mostly, the applications will be desktop agnostic so the APIs are a unlikely issue.

But user experience, stability and compatibility may be issues. If I were RedHat, I'd be asking myself if Gnome3 will be ready in time for RHEL7.I bloody hope so though. I use RHEL workstations and I'd really like to upgrade to Gnome3.

If it sounds harsh, start reading up on what they are responsible for. GNOME 3 developers were largely from Red Hat. It was clear early on that GNOME 3 was not what most users were looking for-- that many users were happy with the existing GNOME 2 interface. The GNOME developers responded by essentially saying they knew better than the users and that the "traditional" desktop metaphor was dead (MATE actually made fun of this on their site).

Red Hat is now again causing a very large amount of controversy with systemd, a replacement for the bash-scripts based init systems that many distros were using. The complaints against systemd are similar to those raised against a lot of other Red Hat software, including large amounts of bloat; however, I think a key complaint is that a lot of Red Hat associated software tries to solve problems that don't really exist. GNOME 3 tried to "solve" the interface problems that GNOME 2 didn't have, and while systemd does some legitimately good things, whether it solves any problems or not is really debatable.

TL;DR, look into the stuff that Red Hat is behind; you'd be surprised how much of it is truly sub-par software.

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

Well, being an administrator of thin client servers with about 1000 users that use Windows as their primary OS there are many things wrong with gnome 3. Trying to get all these users accustomed to something not windows (or OS X for very few) was difficult but not impossible since the interface was easier. Trying to get them accustomed to something that is completely different is impossible. The amount of resources on the thin client servers using gnome 2 was about 40% less than now. The indicator panel on gnome3 is supposed to receive App notifications in a simple API (I guess like growl for OS X). It never works on a multiuser server but it uses so many resources that I always end up removing it. Gnome 2 was great as far as user customization, and when I say user I am referring to users that are not savvy. Gnome3 tries to mimic the OS X interface with a unified system preferences pane but there is no comparison. These are just a few things off the top of my head.

can someone give an overview of why gnome 3 is disliked and why MATE is supposed to be better?

One other reason for using MATE over Gnome 3 is the shear amount of hardware support in MATE. I run a triple head system across a GTX 560Ti and a GT 520 using Xinerama. That configuration simply causes Gnome 3 to crash upon start, sadly (and mirror itself in odd ways). I spent a while trying to figure it out, but it just seems this configuration is unsupported. MATE, on the other hand, works without any configuration. Ironically, I actually like the direction Gnome 3 took with the interface, but I can't use it without removing a monitor (which is really not worth it).

Isn't that simply due to lack of 3D acceleration? I've yet to use an accelerated desktop that plays well with two such drastically different GPUs in a system whether Linux or Windows. Software accelerated desktops, conversely, tend to have fewer issues. As far as I would have thought, Xinerama under Gnome2/MATE would have disabled 3d acceleration on your config.

Somewhat more on topic, I would love to see Cinnamon support in Fedora. The Gnome2 paradigm is a bit outdated for my tastes and, while I do like Gnome3, I don't find it quite multitasking friendly enough. Cinnamon still needs work but I find it the 'best-of-all-worlds' from a usability standpoint.

I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora, not because I disliked the Unity interface, but because I disliked Canonical's domineering attitude in which it blew off any criticisms from the community about dissatisfaction with Unity and other controversial decisions about Ubuntu's direction.

Later, I discovered that while Ubuntu was moving towards a model in which there was one and only one desktop environment, Fedora was considerably more flexible. While I'm happy enough with Gnome Shell, I've had reason to try out other desktop environments, and I was surprised to find that they didn't actually conflict with each other, and nearly all my GUI applications work in each of them.

It's a strength of Linux distributions, in general, that users have several options in desktop environments to choose from, and I think it would be a good idea for distributions to make it as easy as possible for users to select whichever desktop environment they prefer.